Data from: How close do we live to water? a global analysis of population distance to freshwater bodies

Traditionally, people have inhabited places with ready access to fresh
water. Today, over 50% of the global population lives in urban areas, and
water can be directed via tens of kilometres of pipelines. Still, however,
a large part of the world's population is directly dependent on
access to natural freshwater sources. So how are inhabited places related
to the location of freshwater bodies today? We present a high-resolution
global analysis of how close present-day populations live to surface
freshwater. We aim to increase the understanding of the relationship
between inhabited places, distance to surface freshwater bodies, and
climatic characteristics in different climate zones and administrative
regions. Our results show that over 50% of the world's population
lives closer than 3 km to a surface freshwater body, and only 10% of the
population lives further than 10 km away. There are, however, remarkable
differences between administrative regions and climatic zones. Populations
in Australia, Asia, and Europe live closest to water. Although populations
in arid zones live furthest away from freshwater bodies in absolute terms,
relatively speaking they live closest to water considering the limited
number of freshwater bodies in those areas. Population distributions in
arid zones show statistically significant relationships with a combination
of climatic factors and distance to water, whilst in other zones there is
no statistically significant relationship with distance to water. Global
studies on development and climate adaptation can benefit from an improved
understanding of these relationships between human populations and the
distance to fresh water.